What is Estrategy?
von DAVID ANGEL DELGADILLO CANO
1. Commonly, the threats to strategy are seen to emanate from outside a company because of changes in technology or the behavior of competitors. Although external changes can be the problem, the greater threat to strategy often comes from within. A sound strategy is undermined by a misguided view of competition, by organizational failures, and, especially, by the desire to grow.
2. At general management’s core is strategy: defining a company’s position, making trade-offs, and forging fit among activities.
3. Rediscovering Strategy
4. Fit Drives Both Competitive Advantage and Sustainability
4.1. Positioning choices determine not only which activities a company will perform and how it will configure individual activities but also how activities relate to one another. While operational effectiveness is about achieving excellence in individual activities, or functions, strategy is about combining activities.
5. After a decade of enjoying productivity advantages, Honda Motor Company and Toyota Motor Corporation recently bumped up against the frontier. In 1995, faced with increasing customer resistance to higher automobile prices, Honda found that the only way to produce a less-expensive car was to skimp on features.
6. Operational effectiveness and strategy are both
7. in very different ways.
8. essential to superior performance, which, after all,
9. is the primary goal of any enterprise. But they work
9.1. Trade-offs are essential to strategy. They create the need for choice and purposefully limit what a company offers.
9.1.1. A Sustainable Strategic Position Requires Trade-offs
9.1.1.1. Choosing a unique position, however, is not enough to guarantee a sustainable advantage. A valuable position will attract imitation by incumbents, who are likely to copy it in one of two ways.
10. Companies must be flexible to respond rapidly to competitive and market changes.
11. Operational Effectiveness: Necessary but Not Sufficient
12. Reconnecting with Strategy
12.1. Most companies owe their initial success to a unique strategic position involving clear trade-offs. Activities once were aligned with that position. The passage of time and the pressures of growth, however, led to compromises that were, at first, almost imperceptible. T
13. Emerging Industries and Technologies
13.1. During such periods in an industry’s development,
13.2. its basic productivity frontier is being established or
13.3. reestablished. Explosive growth can make such times
13.4. profitable for many companies, but profits will be
13.5. temporary because imitation and strategic convergence will ultimately destroy industry profitability
14. The Role of Leadership
14.1. leadership has degenerated into orchestrating operational improvements and making deals.
14.1.1. There will be constant pressures to compromise, relax trade-offs, and emulate rivals. One of the leader’s jobs is to teach